Artistic Licence: Tiring and uninspiring, 25 January 2015, by Nadine O’Regan, The Sunday Business Post

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can cope with it anymore. What am I talking about? The increasingly omnipresent inspirational quote.

Don’t get me wrong. I like and admire the pithy words of Oscar Wilde (“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”). I approve of the thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi (“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others”). I think Stephen King has a lot of pointers to offer on the art of writing (“Amateurs wait for inspiration; the rest of us get up and go to work”). In fact, I’m even keen on what some celebrities have to say – anyone who’s been through the Hollywood grinder must have something to tell us about life, right? But I confess, I’ve reached a tipping point. Is it possible to be exhausted by inspiration? Is it okay to admit that sometimes you don’t want to improve your life, body or soul?

Lately it seems like everywhere I go, somebody is trying to offer me an inspirational quote. Social networking site Instagram is a feast of them, with people offering up pictures emblazoned with pithy lines, designed to engender hope and thoughts of self-improvement. “Just wing it!” advises stylist Angela Scanlon via her Instagram page. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear”.

On Tinder, inspirational quotes are a constant: singletons are frantic, it seems, to sum up their personalities with a line uttered by someone else. Even on Facebook, friends and family are getting in on the act. On the site recently, I was confronted by an article called “24 pieces of life advice from Werner Herzog” (the piece includes the pithy line from the director, “there is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it gets you the shot you need”).

From cutely emblazoned coffee cups to a bewilderingly diverse array of greeting cards, inspirational quotes are the new constant, a feature of everyday life.

In small doses, inspirational quotes are a great thing. Who wouldn’t like to be better? But reading and taking to heart too many inspirational quotes does a rather uninspiring thing – it turns you into an inspirational-quote-spouting turnip, less of a person than the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.

Consider the case of Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter who has ingested so many inspirational quotes that he’s now like Maya Angelou with better abs. Cut McGregor and the man bleeds the things, many of them dreamed up by himself. “I am cocky in prediction. I am confident in preparation, but I am always humble of victory or defeat,” McGregor has said, adding – in truly humble fashion – that he expects other fighters to use his words as inspiration. (One suspects they might prefer the guy who talked about stinging like a bee.)

IQOS (inspirational quote overdose syndrome) is no fun. It makes you into a composite; a rattlingly anxious collection of quick-fix aspirations bundled into the shape of a person. At base level, the need for these quotations suggests the insecurities being carried around by so many. If you’re always trying to fix yourself, the implicit assumption is that you cannot be happy with who you are. In his novel The Corrections, American author Jonathan Franzen wrote compellingly about this tension in modern society, and his perception that in our rush to improve and self-correct, we might be failing ourselves in a larger sense. (If all of us were perfectly hip, his character Gary notes, “who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?”).

So here’s a thought: maybe now we’ve hit the end of January, we could ban inspirational quotes for a while and we could simply start from where we are. We could be ourselves, not our idea of what others think we should be. We could . . . oh hang on, do all these sound like inspirational quotes? Well, like Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”. You’ll just have to excuse me this once.